September 25, 2007 (XV:5) Kenji Misoguchi Sansho The .

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September 25, 2007 (XV:5)Kenji MisoguchiSansho the Baliff/Sanshô Dayû1954 120 minutesKinuyo Tanaka . TamakiYoshiaki Hanayagi . ZushiôKyôko Kagawa . AnjuEitarô Shindô . Sanshô dayûAkitake Kôno . TaroMasao Shimizu . Masauji TairaKen Mitsuda . Prime Minister FujiwaraKazukimi Okuni . NorimuraYôko Kosono . KohagiNoriko Tachibana . NamijiIchirô Sugai . Minister of JusticeTeruko Omi . NakagimiMasahiko Kato . Young ZushioKeiko Enami . Young AnjuBontarô Akemi . KichijiChieko Naniwa . UbatakeKikue Môri . PriestessRyosuke Kagawa . Ritsushi KumotakeKanji Koshiba . Kaikudo NaitoShinobu Araki . SadayaReiko Kongo . ShionoShozo Nanbu . Masasue TairaRyonosuke Azuma . LandlordSaburo Date . KimpeiSumao Ishihara . YakkoIchirô Amano . GuardYukio Horikita . JiroFilm Editing by Mitsuzô MiyataKenji Mizoguchi (16 May 1898, Tokyo—24 August 1956, Kyoto)directed 90 films, the last of which was Akasen chitai/ Street ofShame (1956), the first Ai ni yomigaeru hi/The Resurrection of Love(1923). Some of the others were Shin heike monogatari/Legend ofthe Taira Clan (1955), Chikamatsu monogatari/The Tale of theCrucified Lovers (1954), Ugetsu monogatari/Ugetsu (1953),Saikaku ichidai onna/The Life of Oharu (1952), GenrokuChûshingura/The 47 Ronin (1941), Zangiku monogatari/The Storyof the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), and Gion no shimai/ Sister ofthe Gion (1936)from World Film Directors, V.I. Ed. John Wakeman. The H.W.Wilson Co., NY, 1987. Entry by David WilliamsKenji Mizoguchi (May 16, 1898-August 24, 1956),Japanese director, was born in the middle-class district of Hongo, inTokyo, near the Yushima shrine. His father, Zentaro, was a roofingcarpenter, and his mother, Masa, the daughter of an unsuccessfulHachiro Okuni . Saburo MiyazakiJun Fujikawa . KanamaruAkiyoshi Kikuno . GuardSoji Shibata . Sado ManAkira Shimizu . Slave TraderGoro Nakanishi . GuardDirected by Kenji MizoguchiBased on the story "Sanshô dayû" by Ôgai MoruScreenplay by Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata YodaProduced by Masaichi NagataCinematography by Kazuo Miyagawatrader in Chinese herbal remedies. When Mizoguchi was seven,they had to move to a poorer downtown district of Asakusa becauseof the failure of a business venture in which his father tried to sellraincoats to the army during the war with Russia. In that same yearhis younger brother, Yoshio, was born, while his sister, Suzu, thenfourteen, was given up for adoption to help the family finances, andsoon afterwards sold by her foster parents to a geisha house. Shewas eventually to find a wealthy patron who married her in 1925.These early experiences were to have a powerful influenceon Misoguchi’s films, like much else in his turbulent personal life.At the time of the move to Asakusa he suffered his first attack ofthe rheumatoid arthritis that was to recur throughout his life, andwhich left him with an odd gait and a tendency to raise his rightshoulder when angry. In June 1907 he entered Isihama elementaryschool and there met Matsutaro Kawaguchi, who became asuccessful novelist and Misoguchi’s collaborator on many of hisbest-known films.

Kenji Mizoguchi—SANSHO THE BAILIFF—2When Misoguchi was eleven, after a total of six yearsschooling, his father was forced by a lack of money to send him tolive with relatives in the northern city of Morioka, where he wasapprenticed to an uncle who worked as a hospital pharmacist. Hereturned home in 1912, but his father, whom he hated, refused totwo brothers to live with her. Watching an artist who lived acrossthe street, Mizoguchi began to be interested in painting, and studiedWestern-style oil and watercolor painting at the Aiobashi Institute.At the same time he was absorbing the city life of Tokyo and goingto Japanese variety theatre and Western-style shows in Asakusa. Heread Zola, Maupassant and Tolstoy, but preferred Japanesenovelists: Kafu Negai for his naturalism, Soseki Natsume for aphilosophical view, Koyo Ozaki, for his panoramic and allegoricalnarratives, and Kyoka Izumi for the aestheticism of his sentimentalMeiji melodramas.Mizoguchi went to Kobe in 1918 to take up a job as adesigner of advertisements for a newspaper there. He enjoyed thecity’s progressive atmosphere and the company of new drinkingcompanions, dabbled in theatrical ventures, and wrote poems whichthe newspaper printed; but homesickness drove him back to Tokyo.He moved in with a friend who worked at Nikkatsu’s Mukojimafilm studios and through him came to know Osamu Wakayama, oneof the progressive directors. At this time Nikkatsu was modernizingits methods of production in response to competition from otherstudios. Mizoguchi was fascinated. He offered himself in 1922 asan actor, but found himself doing various jobs such as transcribingscripts. “I remember my first day in the studio perfectly,” he saidyears later. “I was a flunky, that’s all, but at the end of that day, Ithought—this is good work for me.”Misoguchi worked for Eiao Tanaka, organizing sets for hisKyoya Collar Shop (1922) so effectively that Tanaka recommendedhim as a director. This was the year of the famous walkout ofdirectors and actors protesting at the studio’s new policy of castingactresses in women’s roles instead of female impersonators—thetraditional oyama. Because of the strike, a directorial vacancyappeared almost at once. Mizoguchi’s first film, Ai ni yomigaeru hi(The Resurrection of Love) was released on February 3, 1923,heavily cut by the censors because of its resolutely naturalistictreatment of a “proletarian ideology.” Its realistic style wasinfluenced by the innovative critic and director NorimasaKaeriyama. Mizoguchi used a great many intertitles—his firstattempt to dispense with the traditional benshi, the narrator who saton a special platform and explained what was happening on thesilent screen behind him.Ten more films followed in the same year, the averageshooting time being about a week for each. Foggy Harbor, based onO’Neill’s Anna Christie, had a formally framed story beginning oneevening and ending the following dawn, and was as richlymelancholy in atmosphere as the title suggests. It continued theinnovative tendency toward making the benshi redundant, but thistime by using the camera to tell the story so clearly that few titleswere required. Blood and Soul showed the expressionist influenceof Caligari, which had appeared in Japan in 1921. The variety ofMizoguchi’s early output is further demonstrated on the one handby 813, based on an Arsène Lupin detective story by MauriceLeblanc, and on the other by The Song of the Mountain Pass byLady Gregory, a founder of the Irish Literary Theatre. The greatTokyo earthquake on September 1, 1923 caused the evacuation ofSuzu and their father to the studio for safety; Mizoguchi himselfwas filming the disaster for American newsreels and for use in thesend him to school again. The resulting sense of inferiority abouthis lack of formal education stayed with him all his life.In 1913 Mizoguchi’s sister found him a job with a designerof patterns for kimonos. Two years later, when their mother died,Suzu installed their father in an old people’s home, and took herfeature film In the Ruins, which opened to great success thefollowing month.Mizoguchi was now moved to Nikkatsu’s Kyoto studios,where he continued to make many films according to front officerequirements. He found the atmosphere of the ancient city, with itstraditions and its distinctive Kansai dialect, so much to his taste thathe made it his permanent home. Beginning with Turkeys in a Rowin 1924, most of Mizoguchi’s films until the advent of sound werescripted by Shuichi Hatamoto, over whom he exercised adomineering control of the kind his more famous collaboratorYoshikata Toda suffered in later years. Hatamoto was not evenallowed to return home after work, but was enlisted as Mizoguchi’sunwilling drinking partner. Mizoguchi was living with YurikoIchijo, a call girl who moved into the flat he shared with hisassistant director Koji Asaka. In the summer of 1925, she attackedMizoguchi in a jealous rage, wounding him in the back with a razor.The scandal that followed led to Mizoguchi’s suspension from thestudio, interrupting the filming of Shining in the Red Sunset; it wascompleted by his friend Saegusa.J.D. Andrew has suggested that the films Mizoguchi madeafter his return to the studio in October 1925 begin to take on adifferent character, but that from this time began both his obsessiveperfectionism and his preoccupation with the suffering and hostilityof women; it is difficult to judge since almost none of these earlyfilms survive. The first of his pictures still extant, Furusato no uta(The Song of Home), is a studio assignment remote fromMizoguchi’s personal concerns, lauding traditional rural values overthose of the wicked city, although it contains some montageexperiments in the manner of Minoru Murata. The script byRyunosuke Shimizu won a Ministry of Education award.Then came the success of A Paper Doll’s Whisper ofSpring (1926), praised for its sensitive portrayal of the emotionalconflict created by male egotism. The film was ranked seventh inthe first Kinema Jumpo list of the best ten movies of the year. Afterthat Mizoguchi was able to persuade his old school friendMatsutaro Kawaguchi for the first time to write him a script. Theresult was The Passion of a Woman Teacher, and pleased bothNikkatsu and the public so well that it became the first ofMizoguchi’s films to be exported to Europe, where it had some

Kenji Mizoguchi—SANSHO THE BAILIFF—3success. French interest in that film led him to make one withforeign audiences specifically in mind—a portrait of the traditionalJapan based on Kyoka Uzumi’s novel Nihonbashi.This was the era of the “tendency film” (keiko eiga), amanifestation of the new socialist consciousness. The extent ofMizoguchi’s own commitment to this movement is much discussed.Kawaguchi saw his friend as an opportunist merely following theMarxist fashion of the time, but Ritchie and Anderson may be rightin regarding the ambiguity of Mizoguchi’s position as acharacteristic shared by many Japanese. At any rate the leftisttendency led Mizoguchi into a clash with Minoru Murata, a rightwinger who was not only Mizoguchi’s chief rival as a director buthad become Nikkatsu’s secretary in charge of production.Nevertheless Mizoguchi’s own position as head of the scriptdepartment enabled him to make Tokyo March (1929), of which afragment survives showing a use of newsreel techniques. It hadsuccess enough for the company to sanction MetropolitanSymphony (1929), coscripted by the Marxist Fusao Hayashi whohad a great influence on Mizoguchi at this time. The film ran intotrouble with the censors and brought a police reprimand for thedirector and jail for Hayashi, but it still placed tenth in the KinemaJumpo list.No less influential than politics in Mizoguchi’s life andperhaps his work in this period was his impulsive marriage toChieko Saga, an Osaka dance-hall girl whom he met in 1926.Chieko’s attempts to regulate her husband’s life led to violent fightsand brief separations, repeatedly resolved with his promises ofreform.Mizoguchi’s first sound film, Furusato (Home Town),made in 1930, was also one of the first in Japan , and like otherpioneer talkies was marked by primitive recording techniques. Thesilent film that followed, Mistress of a Foreigner, is regarded as thefirst in which the director systematically employed the long take or“one scene—one shot” method that became so much a part of hismature style. He found justification for the technique in thepsychological experiments of his friend Dr. Konan Naito. As thedirector himself explained, “During the course of filming a scene, ifI feel that a kind of psychological sympathy has begun to develop,then I cannot without regret cut into this. Rather, I then try tointensify, to prolong the scene as long as possible.” Around thistime Mizoguchi began to interest himself in the study of music,starting with Beethoven. He was also a member of a folk art groupincluding the philosopher Kitaro Nishida, and wore clothes of amaterial woven and dyed by himself.And Yet They Go (1931), a late “tendency” film, wasfollowed in 1932 by The Man of the Moment, which was Nikkatsu’sfirst success in sound despite production difficulties as a result of astrike of benshi that year. It also marks the end of an uninterruptedseries of films for the studio.For some time he had been discontented with his salary and thecompany’s policies, especially since a new management hadinstituted an even more dictatorial regime. Mizoguchi signed acontract with Shinko Studios, and began work for them by spendingtwo months on location in China shooting The Dawn of Manchuriaand Mongolia (1932), a propaganda piece that failed embarrassinglyand led to Mizoguchi’s refusal to undertake another project for sixmonths.Having been shown a version of Kyoka Izumi’s novelGiketsu, Kyoketsu, Mizoguchi set out in 1933 to adapt it for thescreen. But the novelist, who had greatly disliked the director’searlier adaptation of Nihonbashi, would not cooperate. The studioarranged a meeting at last, and the silent film Taki no Shiraito wasmade in the face of continuing disagreement. Izumi had objectionsto the cast Mizoguchi wanted, but the director got his way, whiledemanding freedom to at shoot his own pace. Beginning without acompleted script, so that changes had to be made from day to day,Mizoguchi spent forty days shooting. The result of his obsessivecare was a success with both critics and public, ranking second inthe Kinema Jumpo list for 1933.The film tells the story of the tragic love of the heroineTaki no Shiraito for a weak and passive young student, Kinya. Taki,a stage performer specializing in a kind of juggling display withwater jets, is a prototype of the rebellious women who appear inmany of Mizoguchi’s films, working for her financialindependence, taking the initiative in the love affair. In the face ofterrible difficulties, Taki contrives to support Kinya through hisstudies to become a lawyer, only to have him as her prosecutorwhen she is accused of murder. The story ends with the suicide ofboth lovers. Close-ups and the normal procedures of narrativeediting are freely used, the film shows Mizoguchi’s increasingtendency to favor the long shot and the long take. It is remarkablealso for its subtle but intense eroticism.Gion Festival, made in the same year, had to be shot inhaste to be in time for the festival of its title, a great annualcelebration in Kyoto. An unexceptional studio assignment, itmarked the beginning of Mizoguchi’s association with art directorHiroshi Mizutani, who had been impressed with Taki no Shiraitoand was to remain with the director for the rest of his career. Asobsessed as Mizoguchi himself with detailed research in theinterests of authenticity and historical accuracy, Mizutani’s setsbecame an essential part of the one scene—one shot method,leading at least one Japanese critic to suggest that the setting is thecentral factor, even the “hero” in Mizoguchi’s films, though othershave found the scrupulously detailed settings too museum-like.Mizoguchi himself, speaking to film students, stressed theimportance of atmosphere, saying that atmosphere to a film is likelight to painting. According to the critic Yasuzo Masumura, itdetermines the very nature of Mizoguchi’s realism, since his motivein devoting such attention to set detail was to provide anatmosphere that would draw the most authentic performances fromhis actors.Often considered “the forerunner of realism in theJapanese cinema,” Osaka Elegy (1936) also shows a concern for theformal beauty of its images that is equally characteristic of itsdirector. An immediate critical success, this was Mizoguchi’s first

Kenji Mizoguchi—SANSHO THE BAILIFF—4association with the long-suffering Yoshikata Yoda, which lasteduntil the director’s death. He was the ideal collaborator for sodemanding a master, submissively revising the script, in this casemore than ten times, before it was grudgingly accepted. Yoda wasnever told precisely what was wrong (Mizoguchi habitually placedall his associates in the same state of uncertainty), but wasrepeatedly instructed to create characters so real that the audiencewould smell their human odor. “Describe for me the implacable, theegoistic, the sensual, the cruel. . .there are none but disgustingpeople in this world.” Yoda himself described the pent-up emotionsthat charged Mizoguchi’s formally meticulous film: “He does nothave the courage to face persons, things, and ideas that assail him.The anger and resentment which he cannot deal with makes him cryhysterically. This is the source of that intensity revealed in OsakaElegy and Sisters of the Gion.” Admired as it was by the critics,Osaka Elegy was a financial failure. The director was summonedbefore the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the film was only justpassed by the censors, so that its distributors, Shochiku andNikkatsu, were nervous of publicizing it.In 1937 the Daiichi Eiga Company went out of business,and Mizoguchi returned to Shinko Kinema in Tokyo, where he firstmade Aien kyo (The Straits of Love and Hate), adapted fromTolstoy’s Resurrection in collaboration with Yoda andKawaguchi.Mizoguchi said that he was influence by VonSternberg in this film, especially in the use of sound, and criticshave noticed in particular his debt to The Docks of New York(1928). In 1936 Mizoguchi had spent an afternoon with VonSternberg in Kyoto, insisting that the protesting visitor watch a badprint of one of Von Sternberg’s own movies. It was during themaking of this film that his associates begin to talk of Mizoguchi’sobsessive concern to perfect his actors’ performances. It is said thatover three days he rehearsed one scene with Fumiko Yamajij almostseven hundred times. Yoda records that with actors, as with thewriter himself. The director gave only a general idea of what wasrequired, leaving the performers “to live and create themselves.”Designer Mizutani recalled that if a long scene was failing to work,Mizoguchi would have the actors rehearse it on their own and tellhim when they felt ready.Despite the exhausting nature of Mizoguchi’s method,Kinuyo Tanaka found it justified by its effect. It worked because ofthe tension it created in everyone. In spite of what many thought,she believed he had a great respect for actors and what they coulddo in the space he gave them. His instructions were few andgeneral. She heard him say a hundred times: “Be a mirror to thecharacter, reflect it, be natural”; never much else.During the filming of the second part of Chushingura—butwithout interrupting it, as McDonald notes, for even a day—Mizoguchi’s wife Chieko went finally insane and was committed toan institution for the rest of her life. Mizoguchi went to live withher war-widowed sister Fuji and her two children. He was madepresident of the Directors’ Society, and engaged in researchingprojects for state policy films. His other accommodations towartime requirements included two more ventures into theunfamiliar and uncongenial territory of the samurai film, MiyamotoMuhashi (1944) and Meito Bijomaru (1945), undistinguished workdone without enthusiasm. Danjuro sandai (1944), a theatricalsubject, he later dismissed: “A very bad historical film—let’s nottalk about it.” Hisshoka (Victory Song) was another patriotic piecemade in 1945 at the instigation of the Information Bureau.After the Japanese surrender, Mizoguchi found himselfelected president of the labor union organized at Shochiku inresponse to the policy of the occupation forces. After three months,unwilling even to consider the notion of halting film production bystrikes, he resigned. His first hesitant attempt at conformity with theAmerican forces’ demand for “democratic” subjects was TheVictory of Women (1946), described by Keiko McDonald as “anoutspoken celebration of women’s rights.”.Mizoguchi was in a creative and emotional depression inthese postwar years, shocked and confused by the Japanesesurrender. Critics were inclined to regard him as a “grand old man”clinging to outdated styles. His politics were as confused as ever:again heading a left-wing union in 1948, in 1949 he was madepresident of the right-wing Directors’ Association, a post he heldfor the rest of his life. Audie Bock believes that “the accusation thathe did not really grasp the new postwar humanism proves itself inthe similarity of the prostitutes’ dismal fate in the 1948 Women ofthe Night and the 1931 And Yet They Go.” During the filming ofWomen of the Night Mizoguchi broke down in front of prostitutes ina Yoshiwara hospital, cursing the villainy of all men, includinghimself.Women of the Night was a commercial success and rankedthird in the Kinema Jumpo list, while Tanaka’s performance asFusako again contributed to a Mainichi Concours award. It is astark and pessimistic “view of prostitution seen as the epitome ofthe social and economic evils suffered by postwar Japan” (KeikoMcDonald).According to Yoda, Mizoguchi was provoked into makinghis next film, The Life of Oharu (1952), by the irritation he felt atthe success of Kurosawa’s Rashomon at Venice the previous year.Whatever the truth of this, it was a consciously ambitious film, ahigh point in the director’s career, initiating a new phase.Collaborating from the start with Kinuyo Tanaka, recently returned

Kenji Mizoguchi—SANSHO THE BAILIFF—5form America, Mizoguchi began without normal studio finance,subcontracting the production through Shin Toho. Shooting wasdone in a “bombed-out park” near Kyoto where the noise of trainspassing every fifteen minutes determined the schedule, but nothingcould disturb the director’s legendary concentration. Since Mis Oyuhe had taken to using a portable urinal to avoid having to leave theset. Nothing could begin till the crane arrived from Kyoto, andauthentic props had been collected from museums. As usual, sceneswere shot and reshot again and again. Strict controls on the budgetwere ignored, and production cost forty-six million yen. Theobsessive perfectionism paid off. Although in Japan it was acommercial failure and only a modest critical success, The Life ofOharu was chosen for the 1952 Venice Film Festival and shared aSilver Lion for best direction with John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Itwas the beginning of Mizoguchi’s belated international recognition,only four years before his death. .The new philosophical breadthoften remarked in Mizoguchi’s later works is strong here. “ForMizoguchi the rights of women are merely a logical extension ofthe rights of man,” wrote Andrew Sarris and, of the ending, “Justone more misfortune after another. Yet Oharu endures. She sees herson one last time, and then wanders into eternity as a street singer, apagoda-shaped hat forming her last silhouette. In the last frames ofthe film Oharu pauses, turns to look at a distant pagoda, her spatialand spiritual correlative, and passes off the screen while the pagodaremains.” Rosenbaum calls it “a coda that tells us nothing and, bydoing so expresses everything.” But where he finds a “relentlesspolemical thrust,” Sarris sees Mizoguchi’s “sublime directionalpurpose” as “a manner of looking at the world rather than a meansof changing it.”.Birch suggests that the spectacular use of the longtake in The Life of Oharu may also have been stimulated byMizoguchi’s desire to outdo the William Wyler of such films as TheLittle Foxes or The Best Years of Our Lives.Beginning with the success of The Life of Oharu,Mizoguchi began to be adopted as a hero by the critics and youngfilmmakers of the French New Wave. Jacques Rivette, writing inCahiers de Cinéma in 1958, pointed out how Mizoguchi’s filmscommunicated across barriers of culture in a familiar tongue, “theonly language to which a filmmaker should lay claim: the languageof mise-en-scène.” In particular the young French enthusiastsadmired Mizoguchi’s long take and what Audie Bock calls “thecentrifugal force applied to the edges of the frame.” In their criticalpolemics Kurosawa and Mizoguchi (then the two best-knownJapanese directors) were seen as opposites, with the latter muchpreferred.Following the foreign success of Oharu, Masiachi Nagata,an old friend, offered the director a rare carte-blanche contract forUgetsu monogatari (1953)—and even so Mizoguchi found himselfinfluenced by the company to provide Ugetsu a less bitterconclusion than he had wanted. The script was adapted by Yodaand Kawaguchi from two stories in an eighteenth century collectionof the same title by Akinari Ueda, with borrowings also fromMaupassant’s short story “Décoré!” During the civil wars of thesixteenth century the potter Genjuro leaves home eager to sell hiswares and becomes lost in a dream world of dangerous beauty,seduced by the ghost of a long-dead princess. When the dreambreaks he returns to his village, to a vision of his wife whom wehave seen murdered by starving soldiers, and to humble toil to raisetheir young son. In a parallel narrative, Genjuro’s brother Tobei,eager to be a great soldier, cheats his way to brief eminence as ageneral. When he is confronted by his wife in a brothel, where sheworks after being raped by soldiers, he returns contritely with her tothe village to join his brother.In one of many letters to Yoda, Mizoguchi explained whathe wanted to emphasize as the main theme of the film: “Whetherwar originates in a ruler’s personal motives or in some publicconcern, how violence, disguised as war, oppresses and tormentsthe populace, both physically and spiritually!” And this theme isexpressed not through documentary realism, but through agrippingly realized vision of the past in which natural andsupernatural, grim reality and distracting dream, deceptivelycoexist. Such critics as Dudley Andrew and Max Tessier have notedthe relevance of the subject, and in particular, Genjuro’s story, to adirector’s own case as creator of artistic illusions in a violent world.Mizoguchi told his cameraman Miyagawa that he wantedthe film “to unroll seamlessly like a scroll-painting,” and thetransitions of mood and atmosphere, for example from the bustlingmarket to the mansion of the ghost princess, are achieved largely byrhythmically fluid camera movement. In one of the most famousscenes, at the climax of the haunted love affair, Genjuro and theghost Wakasa make love by a spring while the camera shiftsuneasily away, following the stream, until a swift dissolve brings ussmoothly to a long shot of the lovers in fluttering kimonos, playingon the shore of Lake Biwa in the glittering sunshine. Miyagawaremembered the creation of these shots as the only occasionMizoguchi ever praised him for his work. Lake Biwa is also thesetting for another celebrated scene when, in the enveloping mist,the boat carrying the two families encounters another containing nota ghost but a boatman dying of wounds. Donald Ritchie drawsattention to the formal beauty and conservative moral message ofUgetsu as exemplified and framed by the opening and closing shots.“Ugetsu opens with a long panorama around a lake, a shot whichbegins on the far shore and then tilts down to reveal the village atthe conclusion. It closes with the child and the father offering abowl of rice at the mother’s grave. . . with the camera moving offinto an upward tilting panorama which describes the movement ofthe opening.” These “separate but similar” shots are “like bracketsto the film” suggesting “a sameness, a spiral-like quality ofexperience,” echoing “the stories of the two women, separate yetinverted: the wife moves from life to death, the ghost from death tolife.”

Kenji Mizoguchi—SANSHO THE BAILIFF—6“One of the most perfect movies in the history of Japanesecinema.”But the immediate reception of the film in the West wasmore significant. Mizoguchi made his first trip abroad,accompanying the film to the Venice Festival, along with Yoda andTanaka. Tanaka found him keeping to his hotel room praying beforean image of the Buddhist saint Nichiren, whose sect he had joinedunder the influence of Nagata. Mizoguchi also had anuncommunicative meeting with the once-admired Wyler, whoseRoman Holiday was a rival to Ugetsu for the Silver Lion.Mizoguchi’s prayers were answered, and his film also won theItalian Critics’ Award.In 1954 Mizoguchi and Kinuyo Tanaka quarreled overTanaka’s project to direct a film with the support of Ozu andNaruse. But it was still a prolific year for Mizoguchi, with threefilms, two of them considered among his finest. Sansho Dayu(Sansho the Bailiff) is described by John Gillett as “not only a greatclassic of world cinema, but one of Mizoguchi’s most probing andrigorously worked period pieces.” Tessier calls it one of thedirector’s most moving works, “fully meriting the adjective‘sublime’ often abused in reference to Mizoguchi.”In eleventh-century Japan, a provincial governor teacheshis children that “a man without pity is no longer human,” but hisconcern for human rights causes him to be exiled. Traveling to joinhim, his wife Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka) is sold into prostitution onSado Island, while his son Zushio and daughter Anju are enslavedon an estate under the brutal bailiff Sansho. After ten years, Zushiohas compromised his humane principles to the extent of becomingan overseer, shocking his sister by branding an aged runaway.When they hear news that their mother is still alive, Anju persuadesZushio to escape, giving her own life to cover his tracks. Seekingjustice from the prime minister, Zushio is appointed governor of theprovince, the post once held by his now dead father. He frees all theslaves and banishes Sansho, then goes in search of his mother,whom he finds living blind and maimed on the shore of SadoIsland. He convinces her of his identity and they embrace.Although the script is based on a version by the novelistÔgai Mori, the story is very well-known in Japan.

Kenji Mizoguchi (May 16, 1898-August 24, 1956), Japanese director, was born in the middle-class district of Hongo, in Tokyo, near the Yushima shrine. His father, Zentaro, was a roofing carpenter, and his

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